M-commerce in France and around the world

14 December, 2016

Insights

M-commerce is booming around the world and is fast becoming a significant part of global e-commerce.

Criteol’s latest report examines the state of m-commerce in France and around the world, with some interesting findings for retailers, including the leading product categories, the importance of applications, and the dominance of smartphones.

Considering selling into France?

In this established e-commerce market, 27% of online transactions are carried out on a mobile device, with two particular product categories attracting mobile purchases: fashion & luxury and sporting goods, which have achieved 21% and 18% annual growth respectively. So, if your business is trying to appeal to French shoppers with these types of luxury or niche goods, make sure your mobile site and app are attractive and easy to navigate in order to encourage your potential customers to place an order.

Criteol’s report suggests some great best practice tips for your mobile shops:

Encourage discovery ‒ ensure products that are expected to be seen on the homepage are on the homepage and allow shoppers to search within categories

Easy navigation between products ‒ with a product zoom function and a ‘save for later’ option

Optimise the purchasing process ‒ highlight important ‘call to action’ buttons and optimise special information fields for relevant symbols (e.g. the number pad should appear for the telephone field)

There are two m-commerce trends that are influencing the way shoppers are buying online. These two trends, which are actually replicated around the world, relate to mobile applications and smartphones.

The power of applications

Criteol has found that 54% of global mobile transactions are carried out on applications, thanks to their advanced features. Applications offer many benefits to retailers and shoppers alike, offering a smooth purchasing journey.

The benefits of applications include:

Three times higher conversion than on a mobile browser

Better performance than browser at every stage of the customer journey

Customers view and buy more products due to ease of navigation

This figure of 54% is up from 47% the previous year, demonstrating the demand for well-built applications that offer your buyers simple purchasing paths for the products they want. Criteol suggests that an app which has a range of advanced features, such as push notifications and personalisation, provides users with a full experience ‒ helping to drive shopping conversions further.

The smartphone is king

In terms of global mobile transactions, Android devices now lead the iPhone, while major e-commerce markets, such as the UK and the Netherlands, are driving m-commerce as a whole. But when we discuss m-commerce, it can be easy to just consider smartphones ‒ especially as they continue to dominate the device landscape. However, it is important to still think about larger devices, despite the demand for tablets falling by 15% last year (from 46 million units to 40 million).

So what’s making smartphones such an attractive device for e-commerce? According to the report, improved capacity and network speed, more sophisticated software development, and features such as fingerprint recognition are all helping to make m-commerce easier and more accessible than ever before.

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